36 c J o f ,., - ø fig ð I , AMS"ffiRDA M DU<E: RI:PAIRS iNC. [MJ;RGENCY SERVfC / \ .-- -- \ --- , I J \) f= \ ' ...----. '" -- ..,.-. ..- kind of home I've alway wanted to hve In-always! How did you know?" Actually he hadn't known, though he should have realized it. Her south had heen so different, stiffened ("like artificial 'hrocade," she'd said) by life in the sterile cantonment areas of dis- trict towns, away from temples and squalId streets alikt. She had told him about it at the very beginning, but for him it had merged into the glare and acrid dust of Bombay 1 942, with no reality outside the chaos of their first meeting. Swirled off the pavements during the anti-British riots, they had been washed up against each other much as the 'hay washed up debris against the western shore; he remem- bered the suffocating press of crowds, his giddiness from the sun and the stench of blood, and then the young woman fallen against the street lamp. "Are you hurt?" When he tried to help her up, he had been startled, al- most affronted, to see her eyes laugh- ing up at him "1 don't think so. Just waiting until everybody goes away to see if I can stand up." Whether it was hysterics or heroics he couldn't tell, hut of course he had taken her home to her aunt-a peppery old lady, who seemed torn between relief at her niece's safety and outrage that she should have so recklessly let herself be escorted by a stranger. "Oh, she isn't that 'had, for all her talk," Kamala had said later, when the discovery of mu- tUdl friends had given him an entry to the house. "At least, this is better than the lives m} brothers lead in the cantonment." She mimicked that life without mer- cy-pursing up her mouth to emit the haw-haw accents borrowed from Brit- \ I - . . "1--- .. -/ ---- . . ish officers, swishing up and down like the ladles she was expected to en- tertain, mincing and swaggering her way through an entire hierarchy of slang and shoulder strIpes, fashionable wives, and dances at the club. "1 had to get away, don't you see? .Ll\.nd when Gandhiji came touring the south I had to go into town and hear hÏ1n. ...l\.rlny personnel weren't allowed to, you know . My brothers were furious. I went anyway, and when I returned I told them grandly that if they wished to fight for the Army, I wished to fight for the country. v\Thich wasn't entirely true, of course. I was fighting: as much for 111yself, like so many other women all over, whether they ad111it it or not. Anyway, things changed when the war broke out. My brothers were posted north. I wa allowed to come here after I promised to live with my aunt, and got thIs job at the Ra- tIon Office. . . ." He had never met anyone like this woman. She charged everything from the Independence struggle to the dingy Ration Office with her excitement; not even the war could quench it. That he had thrown up a college degree to join the Satyagraha movement-to him it had been the single necessity-hecame in her presence a gesture worthy of the national cause, full of fire and dignity. He'd laughed a little at that, but more and more he found himself by her side, marching, picketing, and courting im- prisonment while they worked together as khaddar-clad volunteers for the local branch of the Congress Party. \V ords like "work" and "service" had taken on an indigenous glamour then, strong as the handspun texture of khaddar itself, and to them she had added MAR.CH 2.9, 19b9 c:- :t her own vocabulary of re bellion : "w e ha ve to improvise our values from now on." He had thrown that back at her when she re- fused at first to marry him: "All right, so you're five years older. How in heH can that matter to us? Don't // / -/ // / / ' . we ImprOVIse our own I ? " va ues. What had they real- ly improvised after all, he wondered now, tak- ing co un t, watching his wife's face settle back into its quiet Fnes. A brief civil wedding held over the protestdtions of the old aunt, who'd ins:sted that anything less than an orthodox ceremony was downright immoral. A long and dusty journey across to the mountains of the northeast, where his elderly foster paren ts now lived. Teaching in a vil- lage school in the Himalayan foot- hills, mud-walled and thdtch-roofed, with a printed map of the world and a broken easel-what could be more in- nocuous? Meetings at night. A ram- shackle printing press in the back r00111. The red-faced Anglo-IndIan sergeant who eventually confiscated it, along with the "subversive material" it pro- duced. In the process, the experimental textbook he and Kamala were com- piling for the children had been confis- cated as well, and the major pdrt f)f a novel he was wrIting. None of it had ever come back to hIm. Strange-he hadn't minded the loss as much as being cheated out of his share of imprison- 111ent; though a warrant for his arrest was issued, Independence Day had in- tervened. All political prisoners were re- leased, and Kamala had laughed at him. "N 0\\'" you'll never be a member of the Cabinet, my dear one. y"'ou've never been to jaiL" Others had said it, too, far less charm- ingly; Kamala's own joy-she cher- ished her political independence like a persona] gìft-had subsided rapidly aft- er the partition of the country and the horror of its aftermath. Was that the first step in the change, then? At first, he couldn't have guessed. There was no question about their leaving the hills and 1110ving to Calcutta, to a suburb on the outskIrts of the ugly, sprawling city, where he taught in a school for refugee children and she worked her- seLf to exhaustion at the Rehabilitation Center. Day after day, the refugees had -----